If this title is vaguely familiar to you, you’ve been here a while. I wrote a blog post called the same thing February 18, 2021. One of the absolute worst months I can remember having. To be honest with you, I never revisited that post. I just reached the end of my thoughts and I thought of a name, one title that could summarize the feeling I had, and I never forgot it.

Love is not one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse because it’s not something that plagues us at the end of days. It’s not a destroyer that stops time. It isn’t perceived as brutal like death, or pestilence, or plagues. But it is brutal. It doesn’t kill you, but it does end something. You go on, but that doesn’t always feel like mercy. Love is its own herald and it has its own horsemen, the kind of whose justice isn’t swift or certain. It has all the same ability to be wonderful as it does to be terrible.

In the moment I wrote that blog post, I was aware of that danger. I felt the whisper of its sharp blade. I understood the swift hook that swung from just beyond my veil. But it took me two years to arrive at a point where I could write about it with any sort of familiarity.

New love is green. It’s lush and inviting. The peace and bliss of cool grass, the threatening sting of hidden wasps. Burgeoning love is bright yellow. Blinding and stark, still gilded from its newness but less confounding. Established love is a calm and easy tan. It’s lost its overstimulating shine and brought with it a sense of ease. And it’s through this evenness that we can see clearly. Without the thrill of being chosen, without the misguided call of our milestones, we understand the reckoning we bring upon ourselves.

To love is to be unsafe. To choose another is to choose fault lines. Or as I put it two years ago, “It’s the heart outside of the body, moving around the world in a vaguely familiar way.”

It took me two years, two stages, and two other collections of poetry to write the book I foretold that night. And it’s available now for you to read.

May love and its horsemen bring us all before our reckonings.